At the last Seattle Ignite event, I did this talk, based on this essay, about the changing nature of human attention and how great creators have controlled their attention spans. Check it out.

Ignite seattle uses the following talk format: you get 5 minutes, but most have 20 slides and each slide can only be on screen for 15 seconds. I hacked the format, as you’ll see in an interesting way.

You can find other videos from Seattle ignite here.

Posted in Essays, philosophy | 1 Comment »

The next two weeks I’ll be on various radio stations talking about the Myths of Innovation. Some of these are available online and I’ll add links as I find them.

Today (Wednesday)

USA Network, national, Daybreak
Cable Radio Network - CRN, Cable Talk
KYMO Morning show
The Good life, Sirius satellite radio

Thursday

Charles Goyette Show, KFNX-AM Phoenix
Morning edition, KVON AM San Francisco

Friday

WKWS-FM Charleston, Wolf Wake-Up crew
The Morning show, BizRadio Network
KCMN-AM Colorado Springs, Tron in the Morning

Monday June 11, 2007

The Lifestyle show, Lifestyle talk radio
Think, KERA-FM Dallas TX

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

Morning report, KYW-AM Philadelphia

Posted in On Tour | No Comments »

A recent Businessweek article on 3M highlights the trade off between managing for efficiency and managing for creativity.

I read the article on a recent flight and found the whole debate silly - why is this a polarized, binary decision? That either you have to be going for efficiency or going for innovation? It’s a very narrow way to think about how things work.

First you have at least two conceptual crossover points:

• Creative efficiency. If efficiency is the goal, there are all kinds of innovations one could research for making a company or team more efficient.
• Efficient creativity. If creativity and innovation is the goal, there are ways to speed how long it takes for ideas to get funding, and for staging their development from idea, to incubation, to production, without clipping wings.

Polarizing efficiency and creativity as mutually exclusive is shallow thinking. It’d be just as foolish to define customer satisfaction and profits as competing forces.

Second, as the article points out, requiring universal metrics in large organizations is guaranteed to kill good things you want to keep. In 3Ms case, the former CEO adopted corporate wide six sigma objectives and this apparently stifled creativity (surprise!). For the uninitiated, six sigma is a technique for reducing mistakes & costs that originated in manufacturing, where defects per million are a common metric. As the new CEO points out, this is absurd as you can’t control new ideas in this way.

The last section of the article does suggest you can do both, or that projects can be labeled on a spectrum of how aggressive/conservative they should be managed. And of course parts of any project can be ranked in the same way, with some getting efficiency goals and others creative/innovation goals.

So you have at least two more controls to use:

• Goals per project. If a company has 7 projects, 3 of them might be mature and have primarily efficiency or incremental goals. 4 might be in new markets with more ambitious goals for risk taking and creative change. Every project manager has to be able to define where their project fits relative to other projects in their company.
• Goals per part of project. Like a fractal, within a given project there are always a range of efforts. Some will be more mature and conservative, others more ambitious and aggressive. People responsible for parts of projects have to able to see how their area differs from other areas and be empowered to manage them differently.

So the problem isn’t six sigma or any other method - it’s how these methods match goals and how the methods are applied. The mistake 3M’s former CEO made was trying to solve his problems at the CEO level - with corporate wide efficiency initiatives. He’d have been better served by rewarding middle managers for paying greater attention to goal distinctions like those listed above.

Posted in Innovation, Management | 2 Comments »

Between teaching a course on creative thinking at UW, and writing a book on innovation, I’ve read dozens of books on creative thinking, from handbooks, to games, to psychology literature. Here are the four books I’d recommend as a starter library: they range in focus from handbooks to theory to history.

1. Sparks of Genius: the 13 thinking tools of the worlds greatest creators, Root-Bernstein. This book examines how some of the great creators did what they did. Each chapter takes a tool, such as playing, modeling, imaging or empathizing, and explains how that approach was used by different masters. Provides inspirational historical context and insight to the techniques many of us creators use.
2. Applied Imagination, Alex Osborn. This is the grandfather of all business creativity books. This is by the man who coined the term brainstorming, and it’s an easy read on how to do it right. There are theory, technique and exercises here, it’s well written, and although there isn’t much supporting research I bet you’ll buy the common sense he offers.
3. 101 Creative problem solving techniques, James M. Higgins. Many creativity authors annoy by focusing on their own views, rather than the techniques. This book doesn’t. It’s a flat listing of over 100 creativity games and techniques, each covered in a page or less with instructions for how to use the technique. It’s an ugly, 70s style book (even the recent 2nd edition) but it’s a better reference than almost any of the creativity games/technique books I’ve seen.
4. Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly has several books with Flow in the title, but this is my favorite hands down. It’s based on his interviews with creators in many fields and their own perceptions of how/why they do what they do.

The Myths of Innovation book has an extended set of bibliographies that goes beyond this, but if you asked me to pick four books for the creative person, these would be the set.

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, books, creative thinking | 3 Comments »

My friends at the awesome business networking group Biznik are running their first large scale event this weekend, called BizJam. It’s aimed at entrepreneurs, small business owners and anyone who works, or hopes to work, independently.

Admission is very cheap for an event of this kind: $110 for the daytime events, and $130 for the whole thing till 2am.

Here are some of the highlights:

* 14 workshops & 5 panel discussions (Full schedule)
* Catered gourmet lunch
* Networking with 300 other indie professionals
* Promote your business: trade tables, sponsorship & advertising opps available
* Biznik indie business awards
* Indie fashion show featuring 8 local designers
* Biznik 2.0 Launch Party with aerialist, Beverly Sobelman, full no-host bar & DJs

I’ll be doing the keynote at 9:30am, talking about topics from The myths of Innovation.

I know the organizers and I highly recommend signing up - This is a great networking event at a super cheap price. Hope to see you there.

Schedule, agenda and details or Register now.

Posted in Seattle | No Comments »